Isolation and identification of differentially expressed genes from oil palm flowers
S.R. Syed Alwee1*, L.C. Ching2 and K. Harikrishna3
1Malaysian Palm Oil Board, No. 6 Persiaran Institusi, Bandar Baru Bangi, 43000 Kajang, Selangor,
2PAMOL Plantation, P 0. Box 1, Kluang, 86007 Kluang, Johor
3Genome Centre, Institute of Bioscience, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43300 UPM, Serdang, Selangor
Received 28 August 2000 / Accepted 12 November 2000
Abstract.
Flowering is an important part of oil palm crop production. The ability to control flowering will be economically beneficial to the oil palm industry. As an initial step towards understanding oil palm flowering, flower predominant genes were isolated. Differential screening and cold plaque screening techniques were employed to clone low to high abundance flower predominant genes from oil palm. Over 100 clones were isolated and some were characterized by Northern hybridization and shown to be expressed in a flower predominant manner. Genes isolated can be categorized based on their expression pattern. Sequence analysis was carried out on a subset of the isolated genes and this showed that a high percentage of these genes encoded novel proteins. This indicates that both techniques are reliable for isolation of tissue specific genes eventhough the cold plaque screening technique was more adaptable for the isolation of low abundance genes.
Keywords: Cold plaque; differential screening; flowering; oil palm; differential expressio
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